[This column first appeared in FlyerGroup newspapers on June 10th, 2009]
Driving down the street the other day, I noticed something odd on the side of the road. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I knew something was different about the intersection I was sitting at waiting for the red light to turn. I looked around for a new business, a new sign, an upgraded stoplight — anything.
Then, I spotted him. A man, dressed as Uncle Sam, complete with red and white striped pants, an American flag blazer, and a red, white and blue top hat, was dancing and waving his arms around at the passing traffic on the street.
Bear in mind that I used to live in San Francisco, and in that place, this man wouldn’t be worth a second glance, but what in the world was he doing here in quiet, suburban Avon, Ind.?
After taking a moment or two to process his flailing, I eventually realized that he was attempting to direct the attention of the passing traffic to a tax preparation business that had set up shop in an adjacent strip mall. Clearly, the man needed a sign or a banner of some kind to actually be an effective advertisement, but who am I to tell Uncle Sam how to do business?
Odd as it is for a tax prep place to be “impulse advertising” on the side of the street (as if I’m going to say, “Oh, yeah! I should go have my taxes done right now! Good thing I have all of my financial documents stored in the filing cabinet I keep in my trunk…”), I can’t say I haven’t seen this tactic used before. Or since.
Later that very day, I spotted a tall woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty with a sign and a golden torch, advertising yet another tax place. Two tax costumes in one day? That actually makes sense if they’re in cahoots, or even competing against one another. And we’ve all seen Uncle Sam advertising taxes or fireworks before.
Then came the hamburger. On a blustery, overcast Saturday afternoon, I came across a morose-looking hamburger walking up and down the sidewalk outside an Arby’s restaurant in Plainfield, holding a makeshift sign that said “Roast Burgers Are Here.”
If two times is a coincidence but three times is a pattern, by the time I saw a giant hotdog prancing around outside a Rally’s restaurant in Bloomington, it made four in less than a week, and that meant it was time for a full blown investigation. So I put on my journalist cap and headed for the hot dog.
I found out that he was 25 years old and recently got laid off from an already not-so-prestigious job at an electronics retail store. He has a degree in business management.
When I asked him how he got into the food-miming business, he simply stated, “I answered a classified ad in the paper saying they needed people to dress up for advertisements. I did a lot of theater stuff in college, so it seemed interesting. But honestly, I didn’t really expect to be doing something like this.”
I didn’t ask him what in the world he was expecting instead of this. When you’re talking to someone in a hot dog costume, it’s hard to think of things to say that don’t sound demeaning.
A trip inside the fast food joint didn’t yield much information about the process for selecting a human billboard, because the manager who hired him wasn’t there (interviewing hamburgers, perhaps?). But the supervisor on duty told me all I needed to know: They had placed the ad in the paper on a Monday, and by Friday they had over 50 applicants. To dress up like a hot dog and dance for an entire afternoon.
The story is echoed in all sectors of the economy — anyone who has a job to offer has got more applications than he or she can handle. In some cases, that’s a good thing. As noted earlier, you didn’t used to see that many hot dogs dancing on the side of the road. At least jobs are being created somewhere.
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